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It's an affordable solution with ease of use a major feature. It clearly aims to cover every angle as along with essential change and configuration auditing of Active Directory (AD) and Group Policy, it keeps you appraised of inactive user accounts and expired passwords: all things that silently creep out of control, until that is, crisis results.

There's a lot more on offer including monitoring of Exchange, SQL Server, Windows Servers plus SharePoint and network file shares. Virtualisation is on the menu as Netwrix Auditor also supports VMware vCenter, vSphere, ESX and ESXi systems and for network storage, NetApp filers, EMC VNX, VNXe and Celerra devices.

For testing we installed Netwrix Auditor on a modest Windows 7 desktop where it loaded a SQL 2012 Express database for report storage. Our test environment comprised a Windows Server 2012 R2 AD domain controller, along with Exchange 2013, SQL Server 2014 and Windows Server 2012 R2 file servers.

A wizard made light work of configuring auditing for our AD domain and Group Policy, and it automatically added our Exchange organisation as well. Netwrix Auditor is well suited to distributed networks using a lightweight agent to gather audit data on remote systems which is compressed before secure transmission to the main console.

Netwrix Auditor's modular architecture makes it highly flexible and scalable because you can purchase the components you need, to be effective. They are all accessed from a single console on the host system for maximum consistency and ease of operation.

The well designed Auditor console is a pleasure to work with and all installed modules and reports are accessible from the left-hand pane. The Enterprise Overview dashboard shows all detected changes over time, but it's easily switched to show individual data for AD, Exchange, SQL Server and File Servers.

Netwrix Auditor includes a huge range of predefined AD reports and we could see clearly what had been changed or added, when it happened, and who made each change. Data collections can be scheduled for selected daily intervals and using report subscriptions, we generated regular reports which were automatically emailed to defined users.

Auditors' snapshots provide a valuable rollback and recovery service and we could restore any AD object from the console. We could also record actual user screen activity on selected systems and then replay that activity using the console's video report service.

Reporting for Exchange 2013 systems was equally detailed as Auditor showed all message management activities for the selected time periods. We had no problems configuring it to monitor our SQL Server 2014 system where we kept an eye on all object changes, plus modifications to databases and tables.

The File Server module required the most configuration effort, but the steps are well covered in the documentation. Once working, we used the Enterprise Overview dashboard to view all logged file reads and changes, along with the most active file servers and users.

A big benefit of all charts is that you can easily drill down by selecting a graph. Using this for our file servers, we could bring up detailed reports showing the files in our monitored shares that had been added, modified, or removed, detailing when these changes occurred and the users that made them.

Change and configuration auditing is now an essential requirement for companies of all sizes and Netwrix Auditor is one of the most comprehensive solutions on the market. It's good value, extremely easy to use and clearly capable of providing a wealth of audit information about what are now essential and business critical systems.

Product: Netwrix Auditor 6.5
Supplier: Netwrix Corporation
Web site: www.netwrix .com
Price: Active Directory £8 per user excluding VAT, File Server £4 per user excluding VAT